Saturday, June 29, 2013

I have always been a pretty big fan of zombie movies, ugly- slow assed, slimy,
stinky, brain munching zombies. the thing that has always captivated me about
zombies is no matter how fast you run, and no matter how slow the friggin
zombies run, they always manage to catch up to their prey. then you have the
faster beserker zombies like the ones from the 2002 film “28 Days Later” (Fast
zombies.. scary shit) and then there are the Zombies like the ones found in
this years World War Z. I’m not exactly sure what kind they were, so
I just call them “swarm zombies” They’re faster, even more pissed off, and
hungry. and there are a bunch of them. Swarm Zombies.. Even scarier shit.

World War Z has Brad Pitt and his family in the opening
scene first waking up to start the day, then having some light back and forth
family banter over breakfast. Without giving anything away for anyone who
hasn’t seen the film, if you pay
attention in this scene, you can clearly tell from the television playing in
the background during this scene, that something in the outside world has gone
terribly wrong, and by the time they reach the car and descend into the morning
rush hour traffic, all hell breaks
loose. from this point on, Director Marc Foster grabs you by the eyeballs and doesn’t let go. While he does a good
job with the films direction, it is the plot where the film kind of bogged down
in places for me. the acting is fine with solid performances most notably by
Brad Pitt, Fana Mokoena and Mireille Enos.

The action scenes were briskly paced and didn’t move so fast that you couldn’t keep up
with what was going on, and the sight of a whole plethora of angry zombies
swarming over and feeding on anything and everything and anyone unlucky enough
to get caught up in their path was visually arresting. The one area of the film
that was a bit of a let down for me was that there was an obvious lack of build
up as to when and how the virus that caused the outbreak was created. They just
jumped right into chaos. Nothing- even at closure, was ever really explained to
my satisfaction.. Still, aside from a few obvious holes here and there, World
War Z still managed to hold my attention for the entire length of the film and
I did still enjoy it a lot. If you like your disasters mixed well with
zombie porn, you should still go and see this movie.

Monday, June 24, 2013

One of the things that I really wanted to get done with
and out of my hair this morning was to go over to Carson-Tahoe Hospital’s
business offices to pay my doctor bill.. while I was waiting I happened to glance
over at the lady behind the counter’s computer monitor and saw the Windows logo on her screen.. I couldn’t
help myself..

“7 or 8?” I asked.

“Pardon me?”

“Are you running Windows 7? or Windows 8?”

She said that she thought it was Windows 7 but the look on her face was telling me that
it was 8. I’ve seen that look before, Most professional businesses here Seem to want to stick to 7 because its familiar and
easy, but a few have turned to the Windows 8.. And much to their dismay the frustrations that most people feel with W8 is
fairly unanimous..

I had a friend about a month ago that was ready to make
the jump from 7 to 8.. He has a Dell machine that was still in good working
order that was running a perfectly fine version of Windows 7 home premium on it, but he’d decided to
upgrade before Microsoft decided to force him to. When he decided to ask me what I thought, I
told him that he should stick with 7 for as long as he could. Although I'm certainly no expert, I’d seen- first
hand, the Windows metro interface up
close during a live demo that they were giving at Best Buy a couple of months
ago.. It seemed confusing and frustrating-
not only to the people WATCHING the demo, but as much so to the guy that was
giving it. long story short? No thanks.

Against the advice from me and a few others, he decided
a week later to make the jump to Window 8, even though the Dell was still working like a
champ. I continued to assure him that nothing but frustration awaited him and
that he would be lucky to survive the experience without pulling his hair out
by the roots. I did Warn him- several times. So he bought a new machine with Windows 8 on it,
and within two weeks he called to tell me that he was ready to switch back to
the Dell with Windows 7 on it. In
conclusion, he’d found the Metro interface to be much too confusing- (Not to
mention annoying as hell) There is no start button, no start up menu, (Although
I later found out that if you hit the Windows key it gives you something that
kind of looks like a traditional Windows Menu.) Anyway, he was done with it
within 2 weeks.

Well I can’t say that I didn’t see that coming from six
miles away. The thing is from everyone that I’ve talked to, Windows 8 is too
drastic a departure from what most people associate with a typical Windows
operating system, the tiles on the start up screen were designed- (From what I was told) for a touch screen interface and are just too clunky with a mouse and keyboard on a
desk top. for me at least- I think Windows 7 is by far a easier less confusing
operating system to learn and I’m sticking with that, it will be interesting to
see how Microsoft fixes this. They are saying Windows 8.1 will address and fix
most of the problems that most people have been having with the current
version. but as with anything concerning Microsoft, I will simply take a wait
and see attitude. its ok I can wait for them to fix it.. if they can.